Are RCA to S-video adapters bi-directional?

[ulera]

Obviously I don't expect an increase in quality... but my TV is stupidly designed so that it won't read from the RCA input jack if an s-video cable is plugged in.

I'm not expecting an increase in quality, I'm just hoping a y-splitter and RCA female to s-video male adapter will allow me to connect both console lines to the same port to save me from having to deal with endless switching and I don't know enough about video signals to know if an s-video lead is capable of interpreting composite video at reduced quality.

[JohnnyBlaze]

Honestly, I have no idea. For things like that, I always use an AV switcher. Saves the headache of plugging and unplugging electronics from the television, ESPECIALLY if you have an HDTV.

[2A03]

I believe almost all of them are.

[ulera]

Honestly, I have no idea. For things like that, I always use an AV switcher. Saves the headache of plugging and unplugging electronics from the television, ESPECIALLY if you have an HDTV.

Unfortunately that's not an option, I'm running two AV switchers but my television just WON'T display composite video if it detects an S-video cable plugged in. Some of my systems use one method, others use another so both cables NEED to be connected but connecting both at the same time doesn't work.

[shybry]

Will it work? Probably. But in my experience, not well.

A while back I bought a cheap passive RCA female to s-video male adaptor because it added about $1 to an order I was making anyway. I tried it with my NES with interesting results. Attached is a screenshot (taken with a poor digicam, sorry) - if you squint just right, it looks a bit like a Greek mosaic. It might work better with different displays though.

What might work better is a powered composite -> s-video transcoder, like a Kramer FC-10D. But it shouldn't hurt anything to try a cheap passive adaptor before considering going down this road.

A better option if your TV has additional inputs is to use one input for s-video (forsaking the associated composite input) and use another input for composite. Though I'm guessing you don't have a spare input if you're asking this...

[ulera]

I have both S-video and composite inputs... but because of the way the TV is designed the composite input will not work while ANYTHING is plugged into the s-video input. It doesn't make sense, but that's the way the TV works.

This is mainly so I don't have to constantly slide around to the back of my tv and rearrange cables whenever I want to change inputs.

[shybry]

Sadly it actually does make sense; it could be an idiot-proofing "feature". But you're not an idiot (I assume) so it's just getting in your way.

I've seen one TV that doesn't prevent both composite and s-video from being plugged in at once, but if you were to try to plug in both AND both are active at the same time for a single TV input (say if a single device has both composite and s-video outputs, and someone plugs in both at once, because matching shapes and colours is fun and easy  ), the picture totally freaks out. So maybe in an attempt to avoid returns or support calls, your TV manufacturer made it impossible for this to happen. In your case, you're not trying to plug in a single device twice, you're trying to plug in two different things and only use one at a time, so this "feature" is making you do extra work.

I guess another possibility is that your TV manufacturer didn't want to include logic to pick whether to use the s-video or composite if both are plugged in, so they just made this combination not work...?